I've got a few Amiga 500s, and 1987 hardware deserves better than a fuzzy composite signal into a modern TV. This is the ongoing project of getting them usable again — good video, real storage, and a development environment where I can actually write and run 68k code today.
Video output
The A500 gives you 15 kHz RGB (and a truly awful RF modulator), which most modern displays simply refuse to lock onto. The options, roughly in order of how much I care:
- Composite (RCA) — works everywhere, looks like a blurry mess. Fine for "does it boot."
- RGB → SCART — pixel-perfect on a Euro CRT. The authentic answer, if you can find a CRT that isn't a museum piece.
- RGB2HDMI — taps the digital video inside the machine (before it goes analog) and produces HDMI. Cleanest possible signal, and what I actually run.
- Internal flicker-fixers (Indivision ECS) and external scalers (OSSC, RetroTINK) —
RGB → SCART → scaler → HDMI. Note: cheap "SCART to HDMI" adapters generally do not work, because they assume 31 kHz VGA input.
One of my A500s now has an RGB2HDMI installed alongside a 2 MB memory upgrade, which together make it a genuinely pleasant machine to actually use rather than just admire.
Storage
The stock A500 has no hard drive, no IDE, no SCSI — just floppies and expansion ports. So "modern storage" is really an adapter pretending to be something the Amiga understands:
- Gotek USB floppy emulator — cheap and easy. I've fitted one; it flashes with FlashFloppy and reads ADF images off a USB stick.
- IDE68k + CompactFlash — a small board that taps the 68000 socket and adds real IDE. Cheap, fast, and a fun hacker mod.
- PiStorm — replaces the CPU with a Raspberry Pi emulating 68k. Insanely fast, SD storage, RTG graphics. Philosophically cheating, genuinely great.
The sidecar idea (early days)
The project I'm most excited about is still mostly on paper. The A500's sidecar expansion slot is a bus I can talk to myself — so the idea is to build an SD-card interface for the sidecar port in Verilog, as a way to actually learn FPGA design on a real problem instead of a tutorial.
It's very early — planning and reading, nothing built yet. But it ties together the two things I keep coming back to: retro hardware and getting my hands closer to the metal.
68k development environment
I use the Amiga C/C++ extension for VS Code for playing with Amiga code. It's a full stack — toolchain, emulator, and debugging wired together — which makes it the path of least resistance for running something on a virtual Amiga in seconds.
I'd honestly prefer to do it in Neovim. But the VS Code extension is just too handy for the full-stack workflow, so here we are.
Why
Because the A500 is a design classic, because "retro" shouldn't mean "unusable," and because there's real satisfaction in making a 1987 machine talk to a 2026 monitor — on your own terms.